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By Root 1133 0

than participants, but most of the time we aren’t even spectators. Every morning we “follow” sports in the newspapers, scanning the reports—and statistics—on games we have not seen with the nervous avidity of a stockbroker reading the ticker. But while the broker’s interest in The Facts is personal and practical, since his living depends on them, the sports mania is an abstract passion, unrelated to personal interest and exercised for the most part not even as a spectator, but as a reader. My youngest son, at eleven, on some minor clash at the breakfast table, suddenly and mysteriously burst into tears; I found later that he had just read in the morning paper that the New York Rangers had lost a crucial hockey game.

It is their respect for The Facts that makes most Americans so touchingly willing to give information to anyone who asks them for it. We take easily to being profiled, galluped, kinseyed, luced, and otherwise made the object of journalistic or scientific curiosity. With amazing docility, we tell the voice on the phone what TV program we are looking at (so that advertisers can plan their strategy for extracting $$$ from us), answer impertinent questions from reporters (whose papers then sell the answers back to us), co-operate on elaborate and boring questionnaires administered by sociologists (so they can get their, not our, associate professorships), and voluntarily appear as stooges on broadcast shows which bare the most intimate details of our lives or—if we miss out on a Fact question—put us through stunts as if we were laboratory animals in the grip of a mad scientist. In the last instance there is, of course, “something in it” for us, but the prizes seem not worth the humiliation, and I suspect are often more of an excuse than a motive; i.e., that the participant thinks of himself objectively—as an object, a Fact—and not subjectively—in value-terms like pride, honor, or even vanity—and so either welcomes or doesn’t mind the public exposure of his Factuality; but that he senses there is something monstrous in this detachment and is glad to conceal it by affecting greed, a base motive but at least a subjective one.

In the thirty years I have been asking people questions as a journalist, I have often wondered why almost no one refuses to give an interview, even though, in many cases, there is more to be lost than gained by so doing. There are some obvious reasons for this—vanity, the American illusion that publicity is always in some vague way to one’s advantage, and the pleasure most people take in hearing themselves talk, especially when the listener is professionally sympathetic and informed. A less obvious reason perhaps is that the gathering of data by journalists has come to be accepted as a normal and indeed praiseworthy practice, and people seem to feel it their duty to “co-operate.” If the story is about themselves, they take the line they “have nothing to hide,” they “stand on the record,” and insist they “just want to give you the facts and let you decide.” In reality, they often have plenty to hide, but it would be a cynical and untypical American who would admit this even to himself.

These assumptions—that it is virtuous to give information and somehow disreputable to refuse to—would arise only in a highly scientized culture. Commenting on David Riesman’s complaint about the difficulty of “drawing a portrait of the autonomous man in a society dependent on other-direction,” Paul Goodman has acutely observed: “It does not strike Professor Riesman that his scientific difficulty might lie in the questionnaire form he employs. For why would a free self-regulating person choose to submit to the impertinent questions of a mere theorist, rather than laugh at him, or pat his head, or be Socratically ignorant and turn the questioning the other way, or maybe weep like Heraclitus? If the sociologist seriously has need, on some practical issue, of the opinions and assistance of a free man, then obviously he must come, himself committed to an active position, and argue, reason, implore; risking getting rejected,